MOUNTAIN VIEW, July 2 -- Vint Cerf spent the early 1970s writing the rules that let separate computer networks talk to each other, work that became the protocols underneath every email, video call and app running today. In his last public appearance before retiring from Google next week, the 83-year-old did not use the stage to reminisce. He used it to warn that engineers now building the protocols for artificial intelligence agents are about to repeat a mistake his generation spent decades correcting.

Dave Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Cerf's retirement from the floor at the Open Frontier conference, hosted by the Laude Institute, telling attendees that Cerf "has been at Google more...